Dems stiffen spine on sequester

Power in Washington these days is most defined by saying “no,” which helps explain why Speaker John Boehner felt compelled last week — in the middle of May — to bring up a wintry debt ceiling fight more than six months away.

At one level it was an act of defiance to appease the right and embarrass President Barack Obama, with whom Boehner knew he would be having lunch the next day. But it was also an admission of weakness in what’s become a high-stakes budget poker game matching the speaker against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

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More than $600 billion in year-end tax and spending changes are already in play, but the ground has shifted to the point where Boehner had to leapfrog still further ahead to the debt ceiling issue, when his “no” will mean something again.

He and other House Republican leaders don’t want another government shutdown in October and have already signaled they will backtrack then from the deeper appropriations cuts in their March budget.

So it is really Senate Democrats who are next in line to wield the power of “no.” In November and December, they’ll be in position to block Republican-backed legislation to stop an automatic 10 percent sequester of Pentagon funds and to extend high-end tax breaks for the wealthy.

Indeed, the new kid on the block is this tougher Democratic mind-set embodied by Reid. And the former Vegas gaming commissioner is ready to risk tens of billions in automatic spending cuts in January rather than give in any longer to Republican demands that all deficit reduction come from domestic savings — with no revenues.

In an interview with POLITICO, Reid said he was open to a compromise that would salvage about four-fifths of the Bush-era tax cuts. But absent some concession on revenues, the $110 billion in spending cuts ordered by the debt agreement last August would go into effect.

“I am not going to back off the sequestration,” Reid said. “That’s the law we passed. We did it because it wouldn’t make things easy for us. It made it so we would have to do something. And if we didn’t, these cuts would kick in.”

“To now see the Republicans scrambling to do away with the cuts to defense, I will not accept that,” Reid said. “My people — in the state of Nevada and I think the country — have had enough of whacking all the programs. We’ve cut them to a bare bone, and defense is going to have to bear their share of the burden.”

This is a major escalation from just months ago, when Obama’s 2013 budget cheerfully assumed that the sequester would never happen. And it takes direct aim at pro-defense Republicans, who have been a mainstay for Boehner inside the GOP and one very big reason the speaker had to fast-forward to try to add the debt ceiling to the fight.

“The largest tax hike in American history is scheduled for the end of this year. So are the defense cuts that President Obama and the secretary of defense have said will hollow out America’s armed services,” Boehner told reporters last week. “And out-of-control spending will force Washington to act on raising the debt limit or face a disastrous default.”